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Dynamic business environment and rapid technological advancement has changed the traditional supply chain into an integrated supply chain. The supply chain is a critical component of the entire business process that can be leveraged with technological innovations to gain a competitive advantage (Gunasekaran, Lai, and Edwin Cheng 2008). At the same time, emerging technologies put up a challenge in terms of their adoption and implementation. Prior studies emphasize the variety of emerging technology application in the supply chain domain like procurement process (Wamba et al. 2018), demand forecasting (Seyedan & Mafakheri 2020), product traceability (Anastasiadis et al., 2021), and optimizing performance using blockchain technology (Saberi et al. 2019; Dolgui et al. 2020). More can be done with real-time track and trace of products in the food supply chain. Now a day’s companies are investing more in automated food software that allows them to quickly detect problems related to production, product origin, code, expiry, order number, and where the product comes into the supply chain. In the same line, blockchain can act as a game-changer through interoperability among different traceability applications without inferring every single entry in the supply chain. Furthermore, blockchain enables traceability across multiple partners, locations, facilities and brings a larger view of the product life cycle to stakeholders (Accenture Report: Tracing the Supply Chain, 2019).
Blockchain has been considered as the spine of the supply chain as it is a shared peer-peer network without any intermediary. Every transaction is represented as a node and the record of these exchanges is kept in a shared and decentralized form where the entire transaction system is verified through cryptography (Chang, Iakovou, and Shi 2020). These fundamental principles lead blockchain technology to enhance the efficiency of the system by reducing redundancy, fraud prevention, and counterfeit detection (Brody 2017; Kersten et al. 2017). According to IDC 2020 report, the worldwide spend on blockchain solutions have increased by 50% in 2020 as compared to the year 2019. As per the IDC update, the blockchain market is expected to grow with exponential rate throughout the forecasted five-year span with a CAGR of 46.4% and touching a nearby total of $ 17.9 billion by 2024 (IDC Spending Guide, 2020).
The dispersion of blockchain technology is still in the initial stage so a structured review of recent rationale on technological innovation, its potential, and efficacy are likely to support both academics and industry people. A review of the literature reveals that the adoption of enterprise blockchain can revolutionaries the retail supply chain in the Indian context (Karamchandani et al., 2020; Kamble et al., 2018). The paucity of research studies focusing on consumer adoption intention toward provenance and traceability of products through blockchain technology provides a strong foundation for this research. Individual actions toward such advanced technology are imperative to be observed to evaluate its scalability. To bridge the literature gap, this study attempts to investigate educated individual adoption behavior towards blockchain technology for food product origin and traceability through extending the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) by additional constructs trust and perceived security and privacy.
This paper is organized as follows: Second section reviews the extant literature followed by the conceptual framework in section three. The survey instrument and study methodology are described in the fourth section. Data analysis and empirical findings of the study are covered under section five and the study is concluded with future research directions under section six.